‘No.6.’ She was not going to explain that she only smoked Peter Stuyvesant when she had taken them from her father.
   ‘Pity,’ said Tony. Like a conjuror, he produced four packets of Peter Stuyvesant and held them in front of Nina. She made no move. ‘Don’t you want your change?’
Nina’s lips hurt. Probably it was the ginger wine. She swallowed down the taste. ‘Thank you, Tony,’ she said. Maggie shot Tony a dark look.

It was two days later that she met Chris in the Black Olive. He was carrying four long rolls of heavy paper.
   ‘Here’s your white horse. No, don’t unroll it now.’
Nina was sitting alone. She knew Chris wouldn’t stay, because he hated poncey coffee bars full of students. She stroked the smooth back of the paper. It was time for her to go. Last time she’d sat more than two hours over a cup of coffee, doing her art homework in the warm, before the owner came over and asked if she was going to pay him rent for the table, seeing as she wasn’t buying anything. There were some friends of Mal’s over in the corner, but they didn’t speak to her and she didn’t speak to them.
        Nina looked up. Through the window she saw a girl coming down the narrow passage to the entrance. Her head was bent over something she was holding. Nina saw a smudge of white through the fuggy glass. The girl’s face was small, narrow and very calm. It was a girl called Sarah, who’d had to leave in Upper Sixth, because she was pregnant. She was two years ahead of Nina. She came in through the door and looked around the café. From the corner table a man raised his hand and beckoned.

Nina hadn’t expected the unwieldy rollicking of the posters as she unrolled them on the floor. If she could get all four of them laid out flat together, like a jigsaw, she could see how big the whole picture was and work out how to fit it on her walls. But as fast as she weighed down a corner with a books or a bag of sugar, another corner broke free and began to roll up. The room filled with a sickly smell of printers’ ink and new paper. The posters would never fit on her walls, even if she could get them to stay there. She decided to concentrate on the rectangle which showed the horse’s head with its mane flying free, and blue sky behind it. The wallpaper was old and pitted, and had come away from the skirting board. She would stick up the fresh new poster with sellotape.
        She criss-crossed it at the poster’s corners, and ran strips along the edge. She had to bend down to fix the bottom and when she straightened up her head filled with blackness. She stood quite still, waiting for her vision to clear. When it did, there was the white horse, nostrils wide, glaring at her. Its head seemed angry at the separation from its body.
        But it was better than before. Now she would boil her egg. The reason she felt dizzy was that she was hungry.

3

  

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